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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Chris asked the following question:Do modular certified EMR’s qualify for meaningful use and also qualify for full incentive payouts?

Answer:
Modular certified EHR software can qualify for meaningful use and the EHR incentive payouts. Although, they can’t do it on their own. Although, if you combine the modular certified EHR with other modular or full certified EHR software, then you can qualify. Clear as mud huh?

The good thing is that you can go to the ONC CHPL website and select the certified EHR software which you use and it will tell you if combined it meets the criteria.

So, for example, maybe you have a modularly certified EHR that is certified for everything but ePrescribing. You could then also purchase a certified ePrescribing software and together they would be considered a complete certified EHR that would qualify you for the EHR incentive money.

At least this is my understanding of the intent. I’m sure there are going to be lots of little intricacies without clear answers.

UPDATE: There was some discussion in the comments about whether you had to have a complete EHR or only one that had the modules you use to show meaningful use. Thanks to Jim Tate for finding the HHS reference that says you do have to have a complete EHR even for the modules which you’ve excluded or menu set objectives which you didn’t select.

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